Little hostel pieces

I visited the Adler Planetarium today. First comment: Ick too many kids.

One of the things I realized is astronomy is the art of seeing the forest via the floor of the forest. Its gotta be tedious and interesting work looking at spectrograph lines, mathematic formulas, time charts, and star charts. Astronomy, like many sciences, is about extrapolating the little details into a big picture. But unlike many sciences where you can observe the results of the little details relationship to the big picture, astronomy doesn’t have the luxury of seeing the whole picture.

If you think about it, it is amazing scientists have come up with the big bang theory. Its something like determining what I ate for lunch last week by looking at my crap. The results are twisted and distorted from the original act, so you have to figure out what the little pieces mean, and extrapolate to the big picture.

In completely other news, I’m really enjoying staying at the hostel. There is an American Library Association meeting in town and all of the roommates in my suite are from there. We’ve had a bunch of little interesting conversations and I’m enjoying getting to know the others in the group.